Time taken: 6:51. I whizzed through this one and was about to declare it Not Tricky Thursday, but then I saw some of the other early times and maybe I was just lucky here.
I found a little bit of everything here – some obscure general knowledge with clear wordplay, one or two where I knew I would have to come back and check the wordplay for the blog and enough direct write-ins that I was never held up along the way.
How did you get along?
Across | |
1 | Shortly wake occasional visitor (5) |
COMET – COME TO(wake) minus the last letter | |
4 | Fitting tee perhaps something that really doesn’t fit (6,3) |
SQUARE PEG – SQUARE(suitable, fitting), PEG(tee) | |
9 | Face about to go plump (4,5) |
TURN ROUND – TURN(to go), ROUND(plump) | |
10 | Say priest backed limit (5) |
VERGE – EG(say) and REV(priest) all reversed | |
11 | Dig out Introduction to Ethics by philosopher (6) |
EXHUME – first letter of Ethics, X(multiplied by), HUME(philosopher) | |
12 | Totter round ring, following daughter as guide (8) |
DRAGOMAN – RAGMAN(totter) surrounding O(ring), after D(daughter) | |
14 | Innate bias spread when away in Rome (2,8) |
IN ABSENTIA – anagram of INNATE,BIAS | |
16 | Ruin party at country club? (4) |
UNDO – DO(party) with UN(country club) | |
19 | Noble type of king lacking protection (4) |
EARL – I got this from definition, not knowing that a PEARLY KING is a costermonger who wears flashy clothes. Remove the outer letters. | |
20 | I am wrong about part of Middle East being unimportant (10) |
IRRELEVANT – I, then ERR(am wrong) reversed, LEVANT (part of Middle East) | |
22 | Tolerate leaving Europe initially, then get on and vote (8) |
SUFFRAGE – SUFFER(tolerate) minus the first letter of Europe, then AGE(get on) | |
23 | Power nap over quickly (6) |
PRESTO – P(power), REST(nap), O(over) | |
26 | Wife comes in to do vocals for big-band music (5) |
SWING – W(wife) inside SING(do vocals) | |
27 | Big herbivore once seen in Antigua? No donkey (9) |
IGUANODON – hidden inside antIGUA NO DONkey. A word I’ve misspelled several times in puzzles, so glad it was clued as a hidden | |
28 | Historian missing first by some distance in elite institutions (3,6) |
IVY LEAGUE – LIVY(historian) minus the first letter, then LEAGUE(some distance) | |
29 | Hard men lead American power in Egypt (5) |
HORUS – H(hard), OR(men), then US(American) |
Down | |
1 | Supply teacher welcomes popular girl (9) |
CATHERINE – anagram of TEACHER containing IN(popular) | |
2 | Frontier family of sisters advance steadily (5) |
MARCH – triple definition – the MARCH sisters are from Little Women | |
3 | Dessert: for a change, it’s a rum one (8) |
TIRAMISU – anagram of IT’S,A,RUM,I(one) | |
4 | Small shed is inaccessible (4) |
SHUT – S(small), HUT(shed) | |
5 | Endlessly stressed over new clothes not to be seen (10) |
UNDERLINEN – UNDERLINED(stressed) minus the last letter, then N(new) | |
6 | Seriously damage a volume in foul temper (6) |
RAVAGE – A, V(volume) inside RAGE(foul temper) | |
7 | State supports case for particularly burning desire (9) |
PYROMANIA – ROMANIA(state) after the external letters in ParticularlY | |
8 | With difficulty pick up area in depression (5) |
GLEAN – A(area) inside GLEN(depression) | |
13 | Loosely two GIs in turn hatching a plot (10) |
INTRIGUING – anagram of two GI’s, IN,TURN | |
15 | Very delicate song Yankee repeated: loudly joining in (4-5) |
AIRY-FAIRY – AIR(song), Y(Yankee) twice with F(loudly) inside | |
17 | Expenditure for departures? (9) |
OUTGOINGS – double definition | |
18 | Economise on protection for soldiers (8) |
RETRENCH – RE(on), TRENCH(protection for soldiers) | |
21 | Scamp puts on British accent (6) |
BROGUE – ROGUE(scamp) under B(British) | |
22 | Dish from South America and Hawaii (5) |
SUSHI – S(South), US(America), HI(Hawaii) | |
24 | Wise man eating starter of delicious meal to celebrate special occasion (5) |
SEDER – SEER(wise man) containing the first letter of Delicious | |
25 | Is sorry about picking up the last trick (4) |
RUSE – RUES(is sorry about) with the last letter moved up |
Lovely crossword I thought. Everything just seemed to come together, with the exception of DRAGOMAN as I had never heard of totter for ragman. INTRIGUING took some working out. Liked AIRY-FAIRY and UNDERLINEN when I finally worked out the wordplay. Plonked in PRONTO at first before realising it didn’t parse and coming up with PRESTO. COD to COMET.
Thanks G.
Horus…I get H for hard and US , but why is OR men….am I just being dim?
OR stands for Other Ranks i.e. soldiers or ‘men’
16:59
DNK totter (not in ODE but in my E/J dictionary) but inferred it meant ‘ragman’. I was going to object to AIRY-FAIRY, but I see that Collins has the ‘delicate’ meaning. I liked UNDERLINEN.
The required sense of “totter” is not in Collins or Dictionary.com, but it is in Chambers. I biffed that one.
Pretty easy, overall. I don’t know why RETRENCH took me so long at the end.
It’s odd that Collins has neither ‘totter’ nor ‘tot’ in this sense because it has totting : British – the practice of searching through rubbish for usable or saleable items.
The Oxfords have the full set of derivatives.
33 minutes for the puzzle with SEDER only from wordplay although it has come up two or three times over the years..
That’s how I knew it. Before the Council tip became all complex and outsourced, there was a “totter” at our local tip. You could buy and sell from him, for cash.
A zippy 23 minutes for me, with DRAGOMAN the one unparsed. It’s lucky I’ve seen it in a couple of puzzles before, as I didn’t know “totter”, either. Having grown up in Gants Hill helped with both SEDER and the Pearly King knowledge, though.
I thought this was harder than it turned out to be, possibly because I am multitasking – doing the crossword, watching Oz v Sri Lanka from Galle (Oz 3 for 500) and making gnocchi alla Romana (delicious!!!). So that took about 35, a terrific puzzle even if I didn’t know ragman or who the March gals were. Thanks G, love those early blogs.
From Mississippi:
Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger that nobody sees
So many things that we never will UNDO
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too
31 minutes with LOI a semi-biffed DRAGOMAN. I’ve lived in many parts of the country but never heard the rag and bone man called Totter. Or maybe I was just deaf in that ear. COD to PYROMANIA where I was detained trying to burn the parsonage down. Decent puzzle. Thank you George and setter.
25:06. Pretty steady solve, with a bit more humour than yesterday’s dry puzzle. like others I hadn’t got the RAGMAN / TOTTER connection (it is in Chambers), and wasn’t quite sure what a DRAGOMAN was either.
like others, happy that IGUANODON was a hidden as it’s easy to misspell.
I liked UNDERLINEN a lot – great cryptic definition.
The north cannot Undo them
With a sleety whistle through them
(In Drear Nighted December, Keats)
30 mins pre-brekker. I liked it. I’m still struggling to come up with a sense of Square which quite means Fitting. Lots of meanings are close, but not cigar-worthy.
Ta setter and G.
I struggle a bit with that too: Chambers gives ‘exact, suitable, fitting’ as a definition but I don’t find that particularly helpful. For starters ‘exact’ and ‘suitable’ don’t really mean the same thing! The closest I can get elsewhere is ODE’s ‘properly arranged; in good order’.
The most famous totters were of course Steptoe and Son. Nowadays people come in white or grey vans or pickups and take away unwanted items or broken appliances left outside the house.
INTRIGUING was LOI, enabled by IRRELEVANT. I also avoided the IGUANODON trap. COD to UNDERLINEN.
13’39”, thanks gl and setter.
Someone was recently fined for blocking the pavement while trying to give away unwanted goodies. The overenthusiastic council had outsourced the prosecution work.
I gather the fine was quashed.
In the very first Doctor Who serial in 1963, the TARDIS is parked in a junkyard on Totter’s Lane…
A lovely nugget, thanks. I will squirrel that one away somewhere safe.
The modern equivalent: where I live there is a huge business in picking bottles and cans out of the bin bags which are put on the street overnight ahead of garbage pickup, and then redeeming them for their 5 cent deposit. Life has become easier for the collectors because recycling laws now also mean that the bottles and cans are in separate bags to other trash and garbage.
A really nice puzzle with many clever and witty clues. Got round in 22:00, I’m glad I’m not the only one who occasionally misspells IGUANODON. FOI IN ABSENTIA; LOI COMET; joint COD UNDERLINEN and DRAGOMAN. Thanks G and setter.
Collapsed at the last again. Bunged in COME ROUND, which answered “face” I thought, and which made CATHERINE & MARCH impossible. As I didn’t see “supply” as the anagrind either (it’s not on any list I’ve got) I got no further. I should have seen COMET though.
Thanks g and setter.
You must, surely, have “supply” on your list. Er… are you pronouncing it the required way, as “in a supple way”?
Crickey, yes I see I was NOT pronouncing it in the right way. It’s on my (mental) list now though. Thank you.
On edit: I meant to say that I’m even more pee’d off because I consider anagrams to be my strength (if I have one) . If I’d have seen it, I’d have got CATHERINE, which probably would have led to COMET, then MARCH, which I knew once I saw the answer. Darn!
Me too. Thank you. Never understood that
9m on the dot. My only slight problem was 12ac DRAGOMAN, which I put in largely because it was the only word that would fit. An obscure word indicated by an obscure synonym for an obscure variant of an old-fashioned word. That sort of thing should be confined to Mephisto!
Quite. Don’t mind obscurities provided they’re clued fairly with something non-obscure.
Natch I feel differently today because I got it – at least enough to assume the totter = ragman bit. Usually I’m on your side.
Oh I got it! My view is – for a change – entirely free of sour grapes.
Absolutely.
7.32, without ever feeling entirely in control, and ultimately pleased to have got the vowels in TIRAMISU in the right order, and avoided the UNDERLINED trap, which I imagine accounts for the reasonably high number of DNFs on the Snitch.
I didn’t fully parse MARCH or EARL, and didn’t know what a ‘totter’ was, although I knew DRAGOMAN. EXHUME was a very nice surface.
Thanks both.
About half an hour.
– Didn’t worry too much about SQUARE PEG as I entered it, but I have the same questions as one or two others over fitting=square
– Thought ‘by’ in the clue for EXHUME was a position indicator for a long time, and it wasn’t until I got the H from MARCH that I realised it was giving X
– NHO DRAGOMAN, or ragman=totter (not familiar with that meaning of totting), so it went in with fingers crossed
– Again like others, I was grateful IGUANODON was a hidden as I’ve spelled it wrongly before
Thanks glh and setter.
FOI Verge
LOI Dragoman
COD Exhume
DNF. One typo thwarted a sub 10 minute score. HIRUS for HORUS. Aaagh! Would have been 09:40. I biffed DRAGOMAN and IRRELEVANT. I’d not heard of TOTTER.
17:44*
What’s that? No one fell for the IGUANODON trap because it was clearly spelled out in the hidden word? Well I’m too full of hubris not to stumble at such an invitation thanks.
Otherwise fairly easy-going but I guessed my last-in DRAGOMAN using the checkers plus the helpful D and O.
Tomorrow is another day. Thanks to both.
Second day I have managed to solve in a reasonable (by my standards) time. Dragoman was in my mind but I have no idea from whence it came nor was I sure of its meaning but at least and at last it proved useful.
DNF. Gave up around 50 mins. Some good stuff but too much not.
NHO Ragman leading to NHO DRAGOMAN guessed luckily from which vowels sounded best.
NHO SEDER could just as easily have been SADGE and was also beaten by the NHO RETRENCH all of which obscured HORUS which was otherwise very gettable but I’d lost patience with it by then.
Also missed Supply as anagrind in the random name but guessed from the crossers.
Not to my taste but thats obviously a minority view.
Thanks for explaining.
NHO Horus and Dragoman but the wordplay was reasonable. About half an hour but with a fatal careless mistake UNDERLINED – doh!
Didn’t realise INTRIGUE could be a verb, as I think it must for the clue to work.
IGUANADON as a hidden was very charitable.
Does anyone have a context in which SQUARE and FITTING are synonymous?
This one fell very nicely into place, with COMET dropping straight in and putting me on a fast trajectory. I knew ragman=totter, but didn’t know the meal and was rescued from SADGE by HORUS. INTRIGUING was LOI for a rare sub 10. 9:27. Thanks setter and George.
A rare single sitting solve in less than half an hour.
Delighted to see IGUANODON – it is the 200th anniversary of its first scientific description.
Thanks to G & Setter
11a Exhume.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel
22d Sushi. This seems to be coming up very frequently.
🙂
14:10
Very enjoyable. RETRENCH took a while; most of the rest went in pretty smoothly, though I got lucky with IGUANODON. SUSHI seems to be cropping up a lot recently but that may be a combination of here, the quick and the Guardian.
COD UNDERLINEN.
Thanks to George and the setter
All good except SEDER which NHO (or remembered from before?), and unsure about SEER being a wise man, so a tech DNF. 23 minutes.
Managed to break thirty minutes in 29.33 for this enjoyable puzzle. I’ve never heard of a DRAGOMAN and for this reason it was my LOI as I searched for possible alternatives. Another unknown was SEDER although the clueing was generous enough for me not to fret over it.
I got off to a roaring start and thought it was more like a QC. Naturally this could not last and I finished in a good (for me) 18 minutes. It took a while to tease out UNDERLINEN (NHO) and IRRELEVANT until the crossers were in. But an enjoyable exercise. Good to see there are priests other than Eli.
FOI – TURN ROUND
LOI – IRRELEVANT
COD – PYROMANIA
Thanks to george and other contributors.
12:58
This all came together surprisingly quickly given the Snitch (currently 84 which would have given me a target of 27 minutes). Built up the lower half very quickly – didn’t know SEDER but assumed correct with all three checkers in place. No problem with totter = RAGMAN – both Steptoe and Son and Doctor Who are references for this. Not particularly familiar with HUME other than through these blogs. Didn’t quite get the meaning of SQUARE = suitable fitting. Very enjoyable.
Thanks G and setter
40 minutes with LOI Dragoman, which I managed to drag from my inner recesses somehow.
Much the same comments as many make: SQUARE =? fitting; DRAGOMAN a problem; AIRY-FAIRY … I initially had rues, thinking that ‘picking up’ was a homophone indicator and wondering about ‘the last’. Liked UNDERLINEN. I still managed to put in IGUANaDON and only noticed my error when by chance revisiting the clue. 36 minutes.
I’m also perfectly capable of misspelling IGUANODON even when it’s literally spelled out for me, and I’ve fallen down that hole before, possibly every time it’s come up.
So being a bit grumpy at losing out on a 12.06 time I’m going to ask the question. The MARCH family grew up in a facsimile of Concord, Massachusetts during the time of the Civil War. So since when did they qualify as a “frontier family”? I mean, their Great Aunt lives nearby in a mansion. Harumph.
‘Frontier’ is one definition – ‘family of sisters’ is a second.
Ah, so at least a triple definition. Fair enough.
Thank you Amoeba. I hadn’t seen that and was going to complain that Concord was only a short night’s walk (well, a short night’s march) from bustling Boston in 1775, and so not really even frontier a hundred years before Little Women.
20 mins. I thought of “square” as “fitting” in perhaps a builder’s or carpenter’s sense (as opposed to “out of square”). I liked the triple definition of “march”.
21:05 – only SEDER was unknown but wasn’t too hard to guess from the crossers, though in a reversal of the usual order of things I needed the answer to 12ac to understand the totter clue.
8 mins approx.
Never heard of SEDER, will look out for it in future.
UNDERLINEN a terrific trap for biffers.
Did Livy for A-level Latin.
DNF. One wrong letter (oWL club again), with a careless UNDERLINED. I’d never heard of DRAGOMAN, or Totter for ragman, so I’ve learned something today. SEDER was also a new one.
Enjoyable
Thanks George and Setter.
Whenever I see “supply” in a clue I am immediately on anagram alert.
Came home late after far too many drinks. I remember attempting the puzzle and when I looked this morning it was complete, but I only had hazy memories of some the clues and answers. I suspect I may have peeked at a few but who knows….
26:32, with INTRIGUING my LOI.
I’m obviously not experienced enough at these, since “supply” didn’t shout “anagram!” at me, and I wasted time trying to make words beginning CATER fit 1d.
SEDER vaguely remembered from the lyrics of “Shine on Harvey Bloom” by Allan Sherman;
We’ll miss you on the holidays, this year they’re coming later
We hope you have a very lovely SEDER in your crater
Your mama sent the astronauts some chicken soup at school
They’re using it instead of rocket fuel
Thanks glh and setter
Re; Square/Fitting.
How about, in recent polls I found my results fitting/square with the national average. ????.
Best I can come up with.🤔
CATHERINE was my last one. Still cannot see ‘supply’ as an anagrind.
Suppl-y, or in a supple manner.
40:26 with a few cheeky checks. Took a break after getting stuck in the NW, but COMET (biffed from “occasional visitor”) opened up that corner. Was late to see CATHERINE, my wife’s name.
LOI UNDERLINEN, not a word I’d heard of. UNDERWIRED was the other contender, definitely not to be seen.
Needed help with 5 letter philosophers with an M in fourth place. There aren’t any, but a rethink got me to EXHUME.
“Supply” as an anagram indicator doesn’t make any sense to me. (on edit, Oh I see, as in supple, added at position No. 765)
COD PYROMANIA
Trotters Independant Traders, a(R)e almost totters.
I had a look after doing the QC. Way beyond me – could only solve 3 on first look so gave up to enjoy an hour in the garden in the sunshine!
“Burning desire” is exactly the kind of witty, worthy of a PDM, but not too obtuse or strained cryptic definition which brings me back to the puzzle day after day. Thx, setter.
All very smooth at 13’55”. DRAGOMAN went in from definition, so I never knew I didn’t know RAGMAN. Is SEDER linked etymologically with the Hebrew BESEDER, meaning ‘okay’? Anyone?
Seder means order, since the ritual built around the celebratory meal consists of a series of 15 separate actions and activities which are to be performed in a set order.
B’seder means in order and, hence, OK.
HTH
Brilliant thank you
17:52, LOI was SHUT which should have been very easy but took me an alphabet trawl to H…
Enjoyable and fairly easy puzzle.
Yes I knew about Totters Lane also!
Thanks setter and blogger
22 mins but having finally recognised underlined, I didn’t make the necessary change.A chewy puzzle but annoyed I didn’t crack it.
15.53, but I needed some help with the parsings.
19’50”
Decent early pace, quickened up nicely.
The lesser spotted sub-twenty; a rarity these days, and all parsed, albeit with totter taken on trust, and no biffs or smudges. All very enjoyable.
Thank you George and setter; you cheered me up no end.